After finally taking the plunge and deciding to take a year off to travel around the world, we are documenting our trip as we go. From the initial planning stages to the trip home, this is our journey.

Thursday, 31 May 2012

The Great Kiwi Road Trip: Part II, Episode III

*A.K.A“Seals and Poaching” (but not Poaching Seals,
because that would be cruel.)

Just a
warning to the seal-averse (the animal, not the “Kiss from a Rose” guy): this
post is going to contain a lot of seal-related material.

Like, a LOT
of seals.

Sh-t loads
of seals.

Ready?
Let’s do this.

We have
justfinished the final leg of our Great
Kiwi Road Trip (Part Deux) in our camper van Chunk. (A side note, every time I
type camper van Chunk, I imagine Chunk to be Dutch and van Chunk is his family
name.) I have to say, we are pretty sad to say goodbye to Mr. van Chunk and to
New Zealand in general. We loved
it there and are already planning to go back, preferably when it will be a
little warmer.

Since I’m
all about themes for this road trip, this past week can be summed up with wine,
seals and a little semi-illegal mollusk fishing.

From
Southland, where I last left you, we moved up the west coast- creatively named
Westland- before we looped around the north of the South Island and headed back
down the east coast (surprisingly not
called Eastland).

On the way,
we stopped to hike, eat and drink, and of course, camp. By now you are probably
bored with me waxing poetic about New Zealand’s stunning landscapes, so I won’t
go too far into it. Rest assured that the entire South Island is incredibly
beautiful and as varied in flora and fauna as every other part of the
country.

This is a color photo of a foggy, gray morning. Suck it, Amsel Adams...

Fox Glacier

Again, something out of an Indiana Jones movie

The first
highlight along the way was a pit stop in the Marlborough region, known for its delicious
white wines. You know how much we love
our wine and how much fun we had biking buzzed from winery to winery in Argentina,
so we decided to do the same thing in the little wine village of Renwick. Granted,
New Zealand drivers are a little more relaxed than Argentine drivers, so we
didn’t get the same element of danger so present during our Mendoza tour, but the
upside was that we got to visit more wineries this time around and were too wined-up
to get an adrenaline rush anyway.

The next
day, we nursed our hangovers with a dose of cuteness by visiting a seal colony on
a beach a few hours away. At our campsite in Marlborough, the wonderful old
lady who ran the site told us about a place along the coast where the baby fur
seals leave their mothers on the beach and go up a stream to play in a
waterfall. It sounded too freaking adorable to be true- like if she had told us about a magical
wonderland where puppies ride unicorns- so
we assumed she was exaggerating.

Well dear
readers, I can tell you that such a place exists and it was the cutest thing
ever. So cute in fact that Vincent and I sat for a good hour and a half next to
that waterfall, watching around 50 seal pups swimming and jumping and splashing
and spinning and climbing up the waterfall only to slide back down again.
Pictures don’t do it justice, so, for the first time in this blog’s history, I
am embedding a video.

I challenge
you to come up with something cuter than baby seals playing in a waterfall. A cute-off, if you will. I mean come on, look
at those little faces! They’re so cute I want to punch something.

Still high
on adorableness, we continued down the coast to hike around near the massive
fur seal colony in Kaikoura. I have nothing more to say about seals except I
love them. All of them.

After two
straight days of seals, we had to say our final goodbyes to them and head back
to Christchurch for our flight to Australia. As a last hurrah in New Zealand,
we camped on the coast- just Vincent, Chunk and me- with nothing between us and
the Pacific but a rocky beach (and, I admit it, a couple of seals- we just
couldn’t tear ourselves away).

During our
last walk along the rocky coastline, Vincent noticed some local mollusks,
called Paua, clinging to the underside of a small boulder in the water. We had
learned about Paua from a woman who ran a seafood shack on the beach
nearby.We were admiring some opalescent
shells on her counter and she explained that the animal that lived in the
shells, the Paua, was an inky mollusk with thick, steak-like meat that has the
same texture and taste as squid.

The seafood shack

Polished Paua shells

What she didn’t tell us, however, was what the
fishing restrictions of the animal were, so later, as Vincent pried the shells
off the rock with a butter knife, I nervously hopped from foot to foot,
worrying that someone would see us doing something illegal. I know, I’m such a
rebel.

Success!

We brought
the shells back to Chunk and fried them up, having absolutely no idea how to cook
them. The result was actually pretty good. They were meaty, a little chewy and
tasted a lot like squid steaks. We were pretty proud to have sampled a local
delicacy all by ourselves, even if we may have broken a law or two.

After a
month there, it was time to leave New Zealand and move on to the next destination. Our departure was bittersweet, as our departures from countries always are. We had so
much fun driving and camping around this beautiful country. Of course, nearly
every part of this entire trip has been fun, but our memories of New Zealand
are some of our best: days spent driving wherever we wanted and stopping
wherever we pleased, picnicking on the beach, hiking through stunning
landscapes; nights spent relaxing with a hot tea or a glass of wine in Chunk, camping
under clear, star-filled skies, watching Lord of the Rings snuggled up under
our comforters in the exact place the films were made. We had a blast and can’t
wait to get back.

We are now
in Sydney to start our Australian adventure, which includes two weeks of
volunteering on a pecan farm that has a café and bed and breakfast. So this
time, instead of blogging about “Nueces!”, I’ll be blogging about pecans.

But until then, I leave you with a photo of our last moments with Chunk.